Half a century ago ago the American writer William F. Buckley published a book titled The Committee and Its Critics, in which he showed that the critics of Sen. Joe McCarthy committed much worse excesses than their target.
Most of the critics came from the left, but there were conservative people on either side of the Atlantic who didn’t have time for McCarthy either. Evelyn Waugh, for example, wrote to Buckley, saying that though he was sympathetic to McCarthy’s cause he deplored “his championship of it”.
While the left hated McCarthy’s crusade against communist infiltration, the right mostly objected to his personality, which they correctly identified as vulgar, crude, ignorant and loudmouth.
No doubt McCarthy was all those things, but he was also something else worth mentioning. He was right.
He was right to point out that key government posts shouldn’t be occupied by people like Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, who had pledged allegiance to a foreign power hostile to the United States.
He was right to block entertainment figures from turning books and films into mouthpieces for cannibalistic communist propaganda, as all those Lillian Hellmans, Dalton Trumbos and Dashiell Hammetts were doing.
McCarthy was right all around, which of course was a good reason to hate him then and to continue to hate him now. However, then the outcry was that McCarthy accused good people of being communists. Now the outcry is that he found anything wrong with communists being in positions of power.
That history tends to repeat itself is a cliché, but it has survived as a cliché because it’s true to life. So for Joseph McCarthy read Donald Trump.
The republican frontrunner is also finding himself on the receiving end of ad hominems, most of them richly deserved. He too is vulgar, pushy, socially unpleasant and unburdened with excessive cultural and intellectual baggage.
Yet, just as McCarthy was right about communists, Trump is right about Muslims. Just ignore all the brouhaha about racism, Islamophobia and other deadly sins and look at what he actually said.
What part of it is wrong? That European governments in general and the British government specifically do nothing to stem the flow of Muslim immigration? But it’s true, absolutely true, and he doesn’t even know the half of it.
That the British government is pandering to political correctness? Undeniable. That’s why Cameron’s first reaction to every new Muslim massacre is to lie that Islam is a religion of peace.
That some parts of London are no-go areas even for police? But of course they are, and some ranking police officers have confirmed it. Granted, the outskirts of London are better off than some banlieues of Paris, where police only ever go in armoured vehicles and where 30,000 cars are burned every year. But take it from the cops who know better: London is bad enough.
That new Muslim arrivals pose a terrorist threat, and that it’s a government’s sacred duty to protect its citizens? I don’t know who can argue with that.
Certainly not Western intelligence services that estimate that at least two per cent of the current influx are trained jihadist murderers (some Muslim sources put the figure at as high as 40 per cent). Hence since a million of them have already settled in Germany, Angela Merkel has extended a warm willkommen to 20,000 atrocities waiting to happen.
How many will happen in Britain? How many will it take for the penny to drop? I doubt anyone could come up with a number, because the number is unlimited. Our spivs’ commitment to PC cant is indestructible, which is more than one could say about human lives.
Oh yes, Mr Trump also suggested that Muslim immigration to America stop until the situation quiets down. That has elicited correct but irrelevant comments that not all, and in fact not all that many, of the new arrivals are suicide bombers.
However, if Europe accepts three million of them, which is beginning to look like an underestimate, we’ll be graced with the arrival of at least 30,000 wild-eyed fanatics thirsting for our blood.
One would think that barring them from entry, with profuse apologies to those Muslims who are reasonably peaceful, is elementary self-defence. Or has anyone repealed the law of self-preservation?
Now half a million Brits have signed a petition to bar Donald Trump from entering Britain, which measure, if acted upon, might put paid to the ‘special relationship’ should he ever become president.
The number doesn’t surprise me, there’s one born every second. But the steady chorus of opprobrium even in the conservative press is staggering. No one punches a hole in the fog of virtual PC reality and gets away with it. And if what he says is true, that’s even worse.
I’m not sure I’d welcome Mr Trump at my dinner table (the hair alone is a huge turnoff) but, given the choice of barring either him or Muslims, I know which way I’d go. Anyone would, who still remembers what actual reality looked like.